Social media comprises any medium, network, channel, or technology for facilitating communication between a large number of individuals and/or entities (users). Some common examples of social media are Facebook or Twitter, each of which facilitates communications in a variety of forms between large numbers of users (Facebook is a trademark of Facebook, Inc. in the United States and in other countries. Twitter is a trademark of Twitter Inc. in the United States and in other countries.) Social media, such as Facebook or Twitter, allow users to interact with one another individually, in a group, according to common interests, casually or in response to an event or occurrence, and generally for any reason or no reason at all.
Some other examples of social media are websites or data sources associated with radio stations, news channels, magazines, publications, blogs, and sources or disseminators of news or information. Some more examples of social media are websites or repositories associated with specific industries, interest groups, action groups, committees, organizations, teams, or other associations of users.
Data from social media comprises unidirectional sharing of content, bi-directional messages, or broadcast communications in a variety of languages and forms. Such communications in the social media are commonly referred to as “posts”. The contents of posts can include natural language conversation, images, multimedia, and/or links or references, any of which can be in proprietary conversational styles, slangs or acronyms, urban phrases in a given context, formalized writing or publication, and other structured or unstructured data.
Generally, a timeline is a temporal ordering of events. A timeline of posts in social media is a temporal ordering of posts that have been contributed by a user during a period covered by the timeline.